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Despite a few alternative views, most every researcher agrees that the scrolls found in caves next to the Dead Sea belonged to the community that lived in Qumran, and most researchers agree that this was the community of those now known as the Essenes. However, most of the scrolls were not written by the Essenes; many appear to be collections of important spiritual and historical documents that may have been written elsewhere by various other groups or authors and then collected as well as preserved by the Essene community at Qumran.

Some forty percent of the scrolls are copies of various texts in the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh! Tanakh is an acronym of the first Hebrew letter of each of the three traditional sections of the Hebrew Bible: Torah (“Teaching,” the Five Books of Moses), Nevi’im (“Prophets”) and Ketuvim (“Writings”)—thus: TaNaKh (there are no vowels in Hebrew, so they are added to help with pronunciation).

Roughly thirty percent of the scrolls are spiritual documents not included in the Hebrew Bible but are considered to be important, such as the Book of Enoch, the Book of Tobit, Psalms 152-155, the Wisdom of Sirach, Jubilees, and so on—all of these documents are from the Second Temple Period (516 BCE to 70 CE).

There were two Temple Periods. Nebuchadnezzar II, who was the king of the Babylonian Empire and reigned from roughly 605 to 562 BCE, destroyed the first temple. He was the king who constructed the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World). In 587 BCE he invaded Jerusalem and destroyed the First Temple of Israel, which had been constructed by the Israelite King Solomon in 957 BCE. The Second Temple of Israel was built after the Persians conquered Babylon. Esther, the famous Jewish queen of the Persian king Ahasuerus, convinced her husband to allow her people to return to Jerusalem and to help them rebuild their temple. The Book of Esther is found in both the Ketuvim of the Jewish Tanakh and the Christian Old Testament. While only a small portion is in the Protestant version, the whole text is in the Catholic version of the Bible. The Second Temple was completed in 516 BCE. However, in 70 CE the Roman general Titus destroyed the Second Temple, which Jesus had prophesied nearly forty years earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 24, when his disciples were admiring the Second Temple.

The remaining scrolls, roughly thirty percent, cover various activities and rules of the Qumran community. They are: The Copper Scroll, The Community Scroll, The War Scroll, The Temple Scroll, The Damascus Scroll, The Habakkuk Commentary, and so on. Scholars have dated some of these scrolls to as early as 408 BCE and some as late as 73 CE. You recall that in 73 CE nine hundred Jewish zealots held out against a 5000-man Roman legion at Masada (a majestic plateau in the western desert of Judea, south of the Qumran caves along the Dead Sea). Masada marked the end of a significant Jewish presence in Jerusalem, both for the traditional Jews and the burgeoning followers of Jesus Christ, who were Jews that referred to their movement as “The Way.” (Acts 24:14) Most of the “Christian” Jews migrated to Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and began the now-famous “Seven Churches of Asia Minor” found in the Book of the Revelation: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos (Pergamum), Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. (Revelation 1:11) These communities became known as Christian, but this is merely a Hellenization of Messianic, which they also called themselves. It is the same as the Greek Khristos (Anglicized as Christ), which was simply a translation of the Hebrew Moshiach (modern Mashiach), both words meaning “Anointed One” in their respective languages. The term comes from Exodus 30:25-30 where the holy anointing oil was used to sanctify one for a special spiritual purpose.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were initially discovered by Bedouin shepherds Muhammed Edh-Dhib, Jum’a Muhammed, and Khalil Musa between November 1946 and February 1947. The shepherds discovered seven scrolls housed in jars in a cave at the Qumran site. Dr. John Trever of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) later reconstructed the story of the scrolls from several interviews with the shepherds. Jum’a Muhammed noticed the caves but Muhammed Edh-Dhib was the first to actually fall into one of these caves. He found some scrolls, which Dr. Trever identified as the Isaiah Scroll, Habakkuk Commentary, and the Community Rule. Muhammed Edh-Dhib took them back to the camp to show to his family. The Bedouin eventually took the scrolls to a dealer named Ibrahim ‘Ijha in Bethlehem. But after being warned that the scrolls might have been stolen from a synagogue, ‘Ijha returned them. An Arab elder suggested that they take the scrolls to Khalil Eskander Shahin, known as “Kando,” who was a part-time antiques dealer. The Bedouin left one scroll with Kando and sold three of the scrolls to a Syrian Christian dealer. It was in 1947 that the original seven scrolls caught the attention of Dr. John Trever, who compared the script in the scrolls to that of The Nash Papyrus, the oldest biblical manuscript then known!

As so often happens, war stopped the research. In March of 1948 the Arab-Israeli War forced the scrolls to be moved out of Israel to Beirut. In April 1948, Millar Burrows, head of the ASOR, announced the discovery of the scrolls in a major press release. Later that year, Bishop Mar Samuel, Archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch, bought the Isaiah Scroll, the Community Rule, the Habakkuk Peshar, and the Genesis Apocryphon. Bishop Samuel showed the scrolls to Professor Ovid R. Sellers, the new Director of ASOR. Professor Sellers attempted to get the Syrians to assist in the search for the cave, but he was unable to pay their price. In early 1948, the government of Jordan gave permission to the Arab Legion to search the area for the Qumran caves. As a result of this, Cave 1 was rediscovered in January 1949 by Belgian United Nations observer Captain Phillipe Lippens and Arab Legion Captain Akkash el-Zebn.

The rediscovery of what became known as “Cave 1” prompted an excavation of the site from February 15 to March 5, 1949 by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities led by British archaeologist and Director of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, Gerald Lankester Harding, and by Roman Catholic priest Father Roland de Vaux. The Cave 1 site yielded discoveries of additional Dead Sea Scroll fragments, linen cloth, jars, and other artifacts.

In November 1951, Father Roland de Vaux and his team from the ASOR began a full excavation of Qumran. By February 1952, the Bedouin people had discovered thirty fragments in what was to be designated Cave 2. The discovery of a second cave eventually yielded three hundred fragments from thirty-three manuscripts, including fragments of Jubilees, the Wisdom of Sirach, and Ben Sira written in Hebrew (Ben Sira was a second century BCE Jewish scribe and sage in Jerusalem). The following month, March 1952, the ASOR team discovered a third cave! This one had fragments of Jubilees and the now famous Copper Scroll. Between September and December 1952, the fragments and scrolls in Caves 4, 5, and 6 were discovered! Between 1953 and 1956, Father Roland de Vaux led four more archaeological expeditions in the area to uncover scrolls and artifacts. The last cave, Cave 11, was discovered in 1956 and yielded the last fragments to be found in the vicinity of Qumran.